1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to an integrated search system and method on a network, and, more particularly, to a system and method for providing the optimal results of an entity-centric integrated search for a query term entered by a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
An entity is an object or a concept that may belong to a specific group, such as a topic group, a person group or an organization group. For example, entities belonging to a person group may include “Lee Sunshin”, “Bill Gates”, etc., and entities belonging to a topic group may include “information search,” “semantic web”, etc. Meanwhile, an entity type is a specific group to which entities belong, and denotes topic, a person, an organization, etc.
Recently, some portal sites, including Naver, have provided a service for additionally showing entity-related information in an upper portion of a search results page when a user enters the name of a specific person or organization as a query term. For example, when the user enters “Bill Gates” in Naver, personal information about “Bill Gates” is displayed in the upper portion of the search results page. However, this means that personal information, which has been manually configured, is merely displayed, but an identifier scheme is not utilized. Further, when a person of the same name exists, there is a limitation in overcoming the ambiguity of the search. Furthermore, there is a problem in that, when a query term in which multiple entities coexist is input, complete entity-related information is not shown.
Consequently, the conventional service incompletely shows information corresponding to multiple entities in which a user is interested, thus not only decreasing satisfaction with search results, but also resulting in a waste of time by requiring a repeat search.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a precise integrated search service, which enables entities and the types thereof to be automatically recognized on the basis of an identifier scheme, such as a Uniform Resource Identifier (URL) or an International Resource Identifier (IRI), and which enables integrated entity-centric search results to be shown.